Read it.

I’ve always thought so.

Read it.

Rather than outlawing virtually all private coverage and replacing it with a single government plan, as Medicare for All does, public option proposals would create a government health plan to compete directly against private health plans. Yet, the economic and political dynamics of a public option would still lead to a single government-controlled health care system. One needs only to repeat the words of then-Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who, during the debate on Obamacare, said “I think that if we get a good public option, it could lead to single payer and that is the best way to reach single payer.”

We looked at six leading public option legislative proposals. The bills differ in design, but all these proposals would tilt the playing field in favor of the public option, drive out existing private health coverage options and ultimately leave the government plan as the dominant, or only, health plan in the insurance markets.

Hydrogen not the magical answer to zero-carbon prayers

What happens to all the old wind turbines?

Whales are vital to curb climate change

Climate Change is not a problem: Unless we make it one.

Climate science does an about-face: dials back the ‘worst case scenario’

New Hampshire Voter Mocks CBS Host Over Climate Change: ‘You Gotta Be Kidding Me’

Too much climate research money being spent on science… AEUHHH???

Read it.

If your dishwasher or busboy is getting money from the government, then that’s money you don’t have to pay them. And they have to vote for Democrats to keep the money coming. Win-win for the Crust.

Read it.

The virus that has spread through much of China has yet to be confirmed in Africa, but global health authorities are increasingly worried about the threat to the continent where an estimated 1 million Chinese now live, as some health workers on the ground warn they are not ready to handle an outbreak.

The ‘Skeptical Science’ Kidz go a bridge too far with blacklisting

SEA LEVEL: Rise and Fall – Part 5: Bending the Trend

Unlike in Europe, the US approach to climate change is actually working

‘Overwhelming and terrifying’: the rise of climate anxiety  The Guardian.

Why Antarctic heat record is more worrying than new coronavirus  To certain people.

A Climate Blacklist That Works: “It Should Make Her Unhirable In Academia”

We must fight climate extremists before they upend society

Media’s Horribly Dishonest Antarctica Propaganda

The Green Oscars: A high-fashion nightmare!

Read it.

I’d like to think so.

Read it.

That’ll clear ’em out fast.

Climate Activist Leaves Environmentalist Movement Because It’s “Too White”  Indeed, I was thinking very much the same thing myself. (Although the Filipina in question would have no problem ‘passing for white’ herself….)

Revolutionary New Recycling Method for Plastic and Waste is Killing Two Birds With One Stone

Climate change: Why are US senators wearing this symbol?  Because they’re hip, and trendy.

Claim: Climate Change is Speeding Up Global Ocean Currents

Breaking Down The Last Decade Of “Terrible” Climate-Change In 7 Narrative-Busting Charts

Shocker: study finds global warming may be net beneficial for the global economy  Drowning the Left Coasts would certainly by a good start….

Read it. And watch the video.

“I would accuse my party at this point of having engaged in three years of fantasy football politics,” Jones told CNN’s “SE Cupp Unfiltered” on Saturday. “Where we said, ‘don’t worry, Trump is never going to be seated, because the Electoral College will not seat him.’ Remember that?

“‘Don’t worry, Bob Mueller is going to take him out of the White House in handcuffs.’ Remember that? ‘Oh, don’t worry, he’s going to be impeached and removed.'”

Joel Kotkin speaks the trend.

Blue-state boosters insist that talent will cluster only in elite places like San Francisco, New York, West Los Angeles, or Seattle, but companies seeking to recruit educated workers increasingly flock to places like Dallas–Fort Worth, Orlando, Nashville, and other affordable red-state metros. The movement of corporate offices has been particularly marked, with an estimated 1,800 firms leaving California for the Lone Star State in just one year. These companies are not just low-wage employers but high-paying firms like Toyota, Nissan, McKesson, Bechtel, Jacobs, Parsons, and Sanford Bernstein. Once a jobs magnet, California has emerged as the largest sender of jobs to Texas. Between 2000 and 2013, the Golden State was the source of more than 51,000 jobs, about one-fifth of all jobs moving to Texas. The most recent survey for Chief Executive Magazine ranks Texas, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Indiana as more business-friendly, while blue bastions California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut stood at the bottom.

Read it.

If travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to have been justified then one country in particular may be worth watching, Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day. Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.

Read it.

DNA is not a blueprint: it’s a recipe coding for thousands of different proteins that interact with each other and with the environment, just like the ingredients of a cake in an oven. Whereas a blueprint is an exact, drawn-to-scale copy of the final product, a recipe is just a loose plot that leaves much more room to uncertainty. Open a packet of cookies: each one was made from the same recipe and baked in the same conditions, but there are no two that are identical. Look closely, and you’ll spot hundreds of little differences: a burn here, a chocolate chip there, bumps and lumps appearing in distinct places, all because of chaotic interactions between the ingredients and the environment.

Read it.

Private hospitals are now consulting a secret medical credit score from Experian before you even see a doctor. As a patient you do not have access to this score, nor can you see how it is generated. All you know is that you may be denied care, or receive different care, because of it.

I guess the ‘medical care is a human right!’ crowd will have their hair on fire about this now.

UNSW Psychologist: “We are all Climate Deniers”

Antarctica Appears to Have Broken a Heat Record

Want to Fight Climate Change? Stop Believing These Myths

Climate Activist Plan to Use Dodd-Frank Banking Laws to Force Fossil Fuel Divestment

Study: Climate Change Is Killing Bumble Bees

The World Just Missed a Five Year Paris Agreement Deadline to Raise Climate Ambition

Breaking down the last decade of climate change in 7 charts

Cambridge Professor: “The only way to hit net zero [carbon] by 2050 is to stop flying”

Activist Explains Why Climate Change Movement’s ‘Whiteness’ Drove Her To Stop Saving The Earth  Guess it wasn’t really all that important after all.

Early climate models successfully predicted global warming

Where America’s climate migrants will go as sea level rises

Steven Hayward.

Cast your mind back to 2009, when Democrats, coming off Barack Obama’s convincing victory in the 2008 election, had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a more than ample majority in the House. Happy days are here again! Here comes pro-union card check, higher income taxes, amnesty and open borders, sweeping climate change legislation, and universal health care! It was around this time that James Carville, the impresario behind Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign, confidently declared that Democrats were now set to rule for the next 40 years! He even published a book—40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.

Carville had drunk the Kool Aid of the liberal-Hegelian conceit that demographics and “the side of history” had delivered Democrats into the Promised Land, from whose commanding heights it was Progress as far as the mind’s-eye could imagine. Well, that glorious 40 years quickly became a fast one-way trip to the wilderness, as it didn’t even last 40 months. All liberals got out of that heavily Democratic Congress was . . . Obamacare? And oh what a success that was. No card check for labor unions, no amnesty for illegal immigrants, only a slight increase in income taxes for the very rich, while climate change legislation went down in fossil-fueled flames, as U.S. oil and natural gas production soared. Obama resorted to trying to get some of these things through executive action, but much of that was stymied in the courts or reversed by President Trump, who came to office and said, “Hey look—I found Obama’s pen!” In the 2010 election, the Democrats got creamed, with Republicans achieving their strongest position on all levels in 70 years.

All this came back to mind watching the Democrats’ debate in New Hampshire last night, which occurred conveniently during cocktail hour out here on the Left Coast, so in fact I literally ate popcorn along with adult beverages while I watched the Democratic field show once again that it is running to be president of Twitter more than President of the United States.

Read it.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Read it.

Assuming, of course, that you survive the experience.

Physicist and television presenter Brian Cox and musician Ed Sheeran have both admitted they can get a bit over-emotional when watching movies on aircraft. A survey by Gatwick Airport in London found 15 percent of men and 6 percent of women said they were more likely to cry when watching a film on a flight than they would if seeing it at home.

Perhaps the prospect of sudden death has something to do with it.

The reduced air pressure on airline flights can reduce the amount of oxygen in passengers’ blood between 6 and 25 percent, a drop that in hospital would lead many doctors to administer supplementary oxygen. For healthy passengers, this shouldn’t pose many issues, although in the elderly and people with breathing difficulties, the impact can be higher.

For none of which, of course, the passengers have expressed informed consent. Interesting how airline passengers are treated in ways that under other circumstances would justify a lawsuit.

Read it.

Louisiana’s continual land loss has created a monumental legal headache: When privately owned land vanishes under the water, who does it belong to?

A task force created in the summer of 2018 to come up with policy recommendations sent its list of possible solutions to state lawmakers Friday, ahead of their regular session.

The problem is a result of the state’s rapidly changing landscape. About 80 percent of Louisiana’s coast is privately owned. But, under an old law, as coastal erosion and sea level rise turn the land into open water the area becomes property of the state, including the mineral rights underneath.

ZMan underlines the changes.

What we may be seeing in the Democratic primary is the pushing aside of the old ideal that still rattles on in the form of Sanders and Biden. Both men are artifacts of the late New Deal period that came to a close in the 1980’s. Sanders still talks about politics as if most men work in factories and coal mines. Joe Biden is running like the friend of the working class, even though his party now hates the working class. These are men of the bygone era, not men of today.

…

Like all managerial types, Buttigieg is a box ticker. He is not a man who actually does things in the world. Rather, he participates in things, gains a credential for having participated in them and uses the credential to advance his career. He was valedictorian of his high school and “won first prize in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum’s Profiles in Courageessay contest.” Then it was off to Harvard and then Oxford for a Rhodes scholarship in Philosophy.

Read it.

As the 2020 Democratic presidential field dwindled, so did their apparent prospects at winning the election come November. Friday was witness to the latest installment in banal Democratic Presidential debates and even their greatest allies in the media could not help but take note of its dull nature. So much so, that ABC (the network who hosted the event) shifted into worrisome mode once the debate concluded.

Read it.

In the UK a Muslim man is being prosecuted for removing his son from LGBT lessons, which he claims risk the safety of his child.

Read it.

‘Donald Trump is not the cause of all of our problems and we’re making a mistake when we act like he is’.

A sensible Democrat! No chance of winning, naturally.

Read it.

We’re often told that Illinois is not losing its highly taxed residents. For example, a Chicago Magazine article last week had a headline saying exactly that. Don’t worry about lost income from the rich leaving, we’re supposed to believe. It’s just poorer folks fleeing.

It’s simply not true. There’s recent, hard data directly refuting that claim. If you want the best evidence, the Internal Revenue Service released its latest state-to-state migration numbers last month. Wirepoints analyzed the number of people moving into and out of Illinois and their net impact by income groups.

Time Magazine: Climate Change Will Make Lethal Coronavirus Epidemics More Likely

China and Russia taking advantage of global warming to elbow US aside in the Arctic

Satellites Are Helping the Municipal-Bond Market Assess Climate Risk

Sugar ants’ preference for pee may reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Friday Funny: Manntastic claims require Manntastic evidence

Plastic-Bag Bans Are Bad for the Environment

Activist Explains Why Climate Change Movement’s ‘Whiteness’ Drove Her To Stop Saving The Earth

Read it. And watch the video.

Nature vs. Nurture is a constant theme in the Manosphere. Yes, it’s a constant theme throughout most natural sciences, but it’s a paradox that’s going to always pervade intersexual dynamics. And mostly because people’s belief sets are rooted more in one or the other. Personal responsibility versus biological determinism is an issue that defines what our perspectives are on a great many things; not just intersexual dynamics. This isn’t an issue of politics or even worldview. There are plenty of believers in our human capacity to rise above our personal circumstances and evolutionary dictates on both sides of the political spectrum. For every hardline Trad-Con espousing the virtues of the human spirit and freewill superseding our physical conditions there is a left-leaning humanist who’ll conveniently agree that humans aren’t beholden to what some inconvenient science says if it aligns with their belief set.

Read it.

Before getting into that, the Department of Labor released January’s jobs report.

Read it.

If you were a billionaire, you could do the same too.

Eric S Raymond continues his discussion of the Chinese coronavirus.

Yikes. Despite the withdrawal of the Indian paper arguing that the Wuhan virus showed signs of engineering, the hypothesis that that it’s an escaped bioweapon looks stronger than ever.

Why do I say this? Because it looks like my previous inclination to believe the rough correctness of the official statistics – as conveyed by the Johns Hopkins tracker – was wrong. I now think the Chinese are in way deeper shit than they’re admitting.

My willingness to believe the official line didn’t stem from any credulity about what the Chinese government would do if it believed the truth wouldn’t serve. As Communists they are lying evil scum pretty much by definition, and denial would have been politically attractive for as long as they thought they could nip the pandemic in the bud. I thought their incentives had flipped and they would now be honest as a way of assisting their own countermeasures and seeking international help.

…

The evidence that this virus likes to eat Han Chinese and almost ignores everybody else is mounting. That’s bioweapon-like selectivity.

Read it.

What?! He hasn’t been fired yet!? I thought Trump was Hitler! Hitler would have put this guy in an unmarked grave by now.

Read it.

Pebble-bed high-temperature reactors get their name from the fact that the nuclear fuel is packed in tennis-ball sized spheres (“pebbles”), rather than in the conventional fuel rods. Each fuel ball consists of thousands of tiny fuel particles, each encapsulated in multiple layers of temperature-resistent ceramic material, embedded in a sphere of graphite.

Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills

Rapid Permafrost Collapse Is Underway, Disintegrating Landscapes And Our Predictions

The world’s oceans are speeding up — another mega-scale consequence of climate change Washington Post.

Global warming is speeding up Earth’s massive ocean currents

A climate activist swam under the Antarctic ice sheet to prove how quickly glaciers are melting  Uh, okay….

The Insignificance of Greenland’s Ice Mass Loss in Five Easy Charts…

Aussie ABC: “Are economists globally understating or overstating the cost of climate change?”

Read it.

The State of the Union address has been described as kabuki theater; an elaborate, carefully orchestrated, melodramatic spectacle heavy on showmanship and light on content. President Trump is good at this, he has built a very successful career in business and entertainment by excelling in theater, in one form or another. His production of, and performance in, yesterday’s State of the Union address was aptly masterful. Nothing that happened there was an accident. The whole show was carefully, and brilliantly, planned and executed. And I think that’s fine; play to your strengths. This is one of his strengths.

My problem was the other side of the show. The behavior of Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in attendance was absurd. What makes that absurdity particularly noteworthy is that it was just as carefully planned and executed as President Trump’s address. They had months to prepare for this. They knew exactly what President Trump was going to do. And the best they could come up with was wearing white, expressing disapproval at America’s successes, and tearing up his speech after he gave it. The Democrats were essentially filming Republican campaign ads for them, making themselves look ridiculous, clueless, and meanspirited, and this was after months of careful planning. This was exactly what they intended to do. I just don’t get it.

Read it.

How very … Republican.

Read it.

An event exclusive to black queer, trans, and intersex students, staff, and faculty at the publicly-funded Claremont University Consortium has changed their event to include “allies” of these groups. The switch appears to be after a student newspaper questioned whether the previously closed event violated federal laws on discrimination.

The Queer Resource Center (QRC) funded by the Consortium — which includes liberal art colleges Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Scripps — is hosting a “BlaQ Mixer” event Feb. 6 that had only permitted attendance by “black queer, trans, & intersex students, staff, and faculty.”

ZMan has a dream.

A good rule that no one anywhere follows, is to contemplate the consequences of being wrong before doing something. For example, if legislatures had to post a wrongness analysis for every bill before they could be voted on, at least some of the terrible ideas would get stopped before becoming law. Of course, that is probably why such a thing can never happen, at least in a democracy. New ideas are about hope and nothing is worse than dashing the reformer’s hope for the future.

Scott Adams calls such loserthink ‘one-sided thinking’.

Freeberg puts the boot in.

The thing we really can’t have, the thing that does more damage than even the deliberate lying, is this sunup-to-sundown, all-year-every-year, “Omigaw this cannot stand” state of being aggrieved…about…whatever. This it’s-always-something thing. We have all these people taking to social media or to the weekday or Sunday morning talk shows, with their various trifling complaints, demanding attention for the trifling complaints over & above what’s appropriate for trifling complaints. Ocasio-Cortez objects to the President of the United States awarding a medal that, in his place, she would not have awarded…well…that’s why we have an executive in this country, who goes around doing things that wouldn’t get done if we had to wait for everyone in our shores with a heartbeat to go along & not object. Sometimes that guy is going to do things that some people don’t like, and that’s okay. I survived Obama, you’ll survive Trump.

And the democrat party has declined to become just that and little else. “Hold up there, I have a complaint.” Don’t buy that gas, don’t build that business, don’t hire that guy, don’t don’t don’t. I’m aggrieved. You have to stop everything and hear my complaint. Carbon emissions, objectifying women, not enough blacks on Seinfeld…whatevs…

Earth Is About To Enter A 30-Year ‘Mini Ice Age’ As A ‘Solar Minimum’ Grips The Planet  Gotta love that Global Warming.

Bubbles trapped in Alaska ice are a mesmerizing, terrifying warning  National Geographic learns the click-bait/scaremonger lesson.

The Federalist: A Majority of Americans Believe OTHER People Should Make Climate Sacrifices

Climate Action Ready Universities Offer Us their Geopolitical Leadership

Greenpeace protesters block entrance to BP with solar panels and oil barrels to mark boss’s first day

All Hail Greta, The Great Carbon Hypocrite

The ‘Junk’ Scientist Is Calling Out Dems For Pushing Google To Censor ‘Climate Denial’ Videos

Global cooling after nuclear war would harm ocean life  Well, let’s hope we don’t get one, then.

Earth Is About To Enter A 30-Year “Mini Ice Age” As The Sun Hibernates, Scientist Warns  Does that mean the seas are still rising? How does that work, exactly?

Read it.

Mitt Romney is a not a conservative, “severe” or otherwise. He’s a Business Class Liberal. Always has been. Yes, he’s very “conservative” on issues like “should the working class always have their wages reduced by constant remorseless labor arbitrage and relocating factories to China,” and “conservative’ on the question “should companies be allowed to take a business expense deduction on their taxes for the costs of moving factories to China,” but on everything else — including, especially, Obamacare, which he fathered — he’s a liberal.

Makes you wonder why he pretends to be a Republican. Of course, I wondered that about Bloomberg, too.

Hey, maybe Mitt ought to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He’s got the Never Trump vote.

UPDATE: ‘Mitt Romney. Not One of Us.’

UPDATE: Trump Acquitted, Romney Guilty

Read it.

The Democrat Party, the party of the intellectual elite.

Read it.

The sham of the Other Left Coast Conservative Establishment is rapidly unravelling.

Read it.

Or, you could just go to a restaurant. Your choice.

Read it.

There’s a quote I’m sure you’ve heard, and it’s usually attributed to Einstein (although he was far from the first to say it, and even he said it different ways at different times): “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought. I know only this: World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Well, here’s a quote with only one author (me): “I know not the source of the next extinction-level pandemic. I know only this: White people will not be allowed to discuss it.”

When the truly apocalyptic plague hits, it’ll be because someone in the nonwhite world ate a civet dick or fellated a corpse’s pustules. And the disease will be seen as the lesser of two evils compared with the racist white folks trying to contain it. There’ll be no way to fight the epidemic without passing judgment on the behavior or customs of nonwhites, and there’ll be no way to contain it without quarantining at least a few people of color. So we’ll all just die.

Steve Sailer fisks a tocsin from the Associated Press.

AP:

The blending of identity was further muddled by government forms, including the U.S. census.

Steve:

In other words, white people oppressed Iranians by declaring them white.

AP:

Many Iranian Americans have historically marked themselves as “white” when reporting their race for the census.

[Which, genetically, they are.]

Steve:

But the Flight from White is cranking up as Iranians figure out that there’s no upside in being officially white in America.

He has entirely too much fun with this stuff.